Death of helicopter pilot in 'terrible rushing' Fraser River shakes up the industry

Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun05.25.2012

The wreckage of a Bell helicopter that crashed in 2005 at Devils Lake north of Mission. Bev Raymond Environment Canada biologist, who was collecting water samples, died, while her colleague and the pilot survived. P

Kathleen Woodhead recalls her son, Bob, bounding home from high school to make a career announcement.

"We were sitting having supper and he said, 'I want to be a helicopter pilot,'" the 88-year-old mother recalls from her home in Stoney Creek, a suburb of Hamilton, Ont.

"I almost fell off my chair. I said, 'Bob, that can be a very dangerous job. Why don't you pick something a bit better.' He said, 'That's what I want to be.'"

He worked at the Stelco steel plant to pay his way through helicopter school and when he got his licence he took his mother out for the first flight.

"Guess where he took me? Down Niagara Falls. I almost had a fit. Oh my God."

Last Aug. 14, a mother's worst fear materialized when her son crashed his Bell 212 helicopter into the Fraser River while on firefighting duty near Lillooet.

That the 53-year-old survived the crash and escaped the wreckage only to drown because he wasn't wearing a lifejacket is something that's shaken the helicopter industry.

The Vancouver Sun in its series on float-plane safety has shown how Transport Canada has failed for years to mandate safety issues on float planes, such as mandatory wearing of life vests, pop-out windows, and satellite tracking systems to provide a more effective and timely rescue response.

Just as conscientious float-plane operators are adopting safety initiatives on their own, the helicopter industry is also not content to wait around for Transport Canada to act, especially when it comes to mandatory life vests when working on water.

"That should have been put in force long before," insists Kathleen Woodhead. "He went in the Fraser River and didn't have a chance. It's a terrible rushing river. He couldn't get out of that. He loved his job. It was very unfortunate what happened to him. I miss him."

Woodhead worked for Alberta's Elbow River Helicopters Ltd. and had 10,000 flight hours on helicopters, including 3,300 hours on water bucket operations.

Elbow River has since implemented a policy requiring pilots to wear life vests -- also known as personal flotation devices -- while on bucket duty. It also requires pilots to fly with the belly hook (a device on the bottom of the aircraft used for slinging loads) armed, so that it can be more easily detached through an electrical release in an emergency.

Woodhead had been helping to fight the lightning-caused Intipam forest fire that forced the evacuation of Lillooet. "We still feel it," said Elbow general manager Torrie Chartier.

Helicopter companies have been shocked into action by Woodhead's death.

Ken Birss, chief pilot with Highland Helicopters Ltd. in Richmond, said life-jackets are now mandatory for the company's approximately 40 pilots. It is not required of passengers, although government employees -- such as those engaged in fisheries work, travelling by helicopter -- already tend to wear them during flight, he said.

"The death of Bob Woodhead, I think it woke a lot of people up," he said. "He was not wearing a life-jacket. He didn't have egress training.

"We're over the water all the time fighting fires. It doesn't have to be the ocean. It could be a 50-foot-wide stream and if that thing turns off you're going to be in the drink."

Egress courses that teach pilots how to escape from a crash in water are also more common, especially since six passengers drowned inside a Seair Beaver float plane that crashed near Saturna Island on Nov. 29.

Birss noted it's unrealistic to expect someone involved in a crash in water to grab the lifejacket from beneath the seat.

"There's no way in hell anyone who crashes is going to get a life-jacket on. The next step will be a requirement that it be on if you're flying over water."

Not all helicopters affected are working on fighting fires with buckets; some are equipped with floats, which carry their own risks, especially when landing on water in still conditions.

'Glassy water' effect

Environment Canada scientist Patrick Shaw was just three hours into the first day of his new job collecting water samples from a float-equipped chartered helicopter. They had successfully sampled eight lakes when the Bell 206-B was approaching Devils Lake, a tributary of Stave Lake near Mission, around 1 p.m.

That's when everything went horribly wrong.

"It was bad luck," he says calmly. "A bit of a surprise."

The pilot for Far West Helicopters misread his distance from the calm mirror-like lake surface, hit the water hard, and the aircraft flipped on to its back.

The phenomenon is known as glassy water -- and it led to the crash of a Beaver float plane in September 1986 at Dease Lake, killing five people, including Al Passarell, Social Credit MLA for Atlin.

Shaw suddenly found himself upside down, the cabin fully submerged by the water now gushing through the aircraft's smashed windows, and fighting for his life. "It was air filled and then it wasn't," he recalls.

Shaw was better equipped than most to survive the accident. Just one week earlier Environment Canada had paid for him to attend an egress training course from a private company that showed him how to escape from an overturned aircraft in water.

As part of his job, Environment Canada required that he wear a life vest, a horse-collar model from Mustang Survival Corporation that could be manually inflated with a CO2 cartridge or orally inflated once he cleared the aircraft.

Vests that automatically inflate when they hit water are not recommended in aircraft.

Shaw unbuckled his seat belt, escaped from his back seat, and inflated his vest.

The pilot got out, too.

But Shaw's Environment Canada colleague, 53-year-old Bev Raymond, seated in the left front seat, did not surface.

"I dove down and opened the door and pulled her out. At that point we realized there was really something seriously wrong."

When the rotor hit the water at 750 km/h, one of the blades penetrated the front of the aircraft and struck Raymond in the head, knocking her unconscious. Only the pilot's helmet saved him from a similar fate.

Shaw swam with Raymond about 200 metres to shore, then used a satellite phone kept in a waterproof case to call for help. She died six days later.

Almost five years after that Oct. 26, 2005 tragedy, Shaw continues to fly such aircraft and says people who fly only occasionally should not be unduly concerned with a crash. However, he does believe that wearing life vests should be mandatory during all flights on water. "I think it makes perfect sense," he said. "It's just prudent, really. I'm sort of surprised they don't do it."

Bill Yearwood, regional manager of the federal Transportation Safety Board (TSB), knows only too well the dangers associated with helicopter egress. In 1976, he was working as an instructor with Okanagan Helicopters in Penticton piloting a float-equipped Bell 206 and instructing on how to land in glassy water conditions on Okanagan Lake when the very dangers he was demonstrating caught him off guard.

"It went wrong. The helicopter upset. My first instinct was to undo my seatbelt. Now I'd lost reference of where I was in the cabin."

Indeed, that is the last thing someone should do when escaping an aircraft because suddenly you have lost your orientation and reduced your chances of finding an exit.

While searching for a way out in the chaos, Yearwood felt the pilot tube -- the device at the front of the helicopter that captures the air speed -- which meant he was already outside the aircraft, having exited via the shattered window and into the cold January waters. Three others also escaped the accident, but no one immediately thought to inflate their life vests even though they'd been put on before the flight.

"Even as a pilot having put on the life-jacket ... in the anxiousness or panic of getting out of the aircraft and having identified I was outside the aircraft, I never thought of the lifejacket."

Experiences like that also undercut the argument that passengers required to wear life vests in flight would inflate them in a panic during a crash, making it more difficult to escape. In a plane crash, people tend to be focused on getting out.

Safety policy urged

Vivian Thomas, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Forests, said the province's Wildfire Management Branch, along with other fire agencies across Canada, have been working with the Helicopter Association of Canada safety committee to encourage all companies to develop a safety policy that mandates flotation devices for bucketing operations.

The branch does require rappel staff to wear flotation devices and complete egress training, she said.

Association president Fred Jones confirmed in an interview from Ottawa that the drowning of Woodhead in the Fraser River has spurred a trend of wearing life-jackets during bucketing operations nation wide. More pilots are also wearing helmets. Pop-out windows, quick-release doors and water immersion suits are other options in the industry, especially those servicing offshore oil rigs.

Jones estimated there are about 4,200 commercial helicopter pilots in Canada and 1,800 helicopters.

Between 1979 and 2006, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada investigated 46 helicopter crashes into water in which 27 of 124 crew and passengers died, a survival rate of 78 per cent. About 60 per cent of the crashes occurred during landing, takeoff or hovering.

A study published in 2008 in Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine found that lack of warning time, rapid sinking, and inversion were the significant factors in the survival rate. "The practical implication is that crew and passengers involved in planned flights over water must wear all the life support equipment ... and not have it stowed on the back of the seat or in the cabin."

Harmen Keyser is a Vancouver geologist with more than 20 years experience as a helicopter pilot. He said it's important not to lose sight of the fact that most accidents are caused by human error, and the chance of error increases on small aircraft where there is no co-pilot to offer a second opinion on flight decisions and to ensure adherence to rules and procedures.

He noted the "complex interaction" between the pilot, company management, customers, the aircraft and various external factors such as weather and water conditions, adding that the "smaller the aircraft, the larger the proportion of accidents is caused by pilot error."

Passengers can enhance their own safety by listening to the safety briefing, studying the safety card, making an escape plan and by not pressuring pilots to fly in unsafe conditions. "It's much easier for a 747 captain to announce a flight delay over an anonymous PA system than for a Beaver pilot looking his/her passenger in the eye with the so-called bad news."

lpynn@vancouversun.com

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Death of helicopter pilot in 'terrible rushing' Fraser River shakes up the industry

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